Digital games as a form of play. Play as a part of life.

Main Menu

Koreans wait in line to get GTA5

On Twitter, user LoLiel shared a photo of people waiting in line to buy GTA5 at Hottracs, a record/game store in the Gangnam district of Seoul.

The Korean version of Grand Theft Auto 5 was officially released in Korea on Sept. 17 and players were lined up in anticipation of what was locally promoted to be the most violent racing game of all time. Even though the one had to pre-order the game, number tickets were distributed on site for people who came to pick up the game.

The game was released for both Xbox 360 and PS3. The Korean version has closed captioning of the dialog and an enclosed map of Los Santos that is also translated into Korean. . Korea is a country where online gaming is generally more popular than console gaming, so while the hype was not as crazy as that of some other countries, it was still relatively strong.

Meanwhile, GTA5 receives extremely high reviews and a fan in the UK is stabbed before being robbed of his copy. There are also two companion apps that are more “casual”. One allows you to customize the car you play with in the game and the second is a pet-rearing game. These two genres don’t seem like ones that will particularly appeal to the demographic of GTA players, but maybe we will see a trend where couples play pseudo-together; one plays the console game and the other the iPhone game.